I am looking for a device for my mother for redundant storage of her photos. Local (non-cloud) based is a requirement.

I would prepare the device for her in a RAID 1+0 (at least 4 drives, striped no parity with mirroring) in advance, then ship it to her (lives in another state).

She will plug it in via USB 3.0 and thinks it is "one drive" and be unconcerned about drivers or configuration. Ideally if one port ever lit up red as going or gone bad, I can just send her a new drive and she swaps it out and it rebuilds without her having to do anything.

Any recommendations for a product like this? I imagine configuration would be via a network port web server or special application that talks over the same USB connection. Either of those would be fine.

I do not want a NAS that has to make a network drive connection, it must be direct attached.

This question may be flagged as "shopping" question, but you can easily google for "RAID Enclosures" most of them will hide the fact that they are RAIDed and the host PC will simply think its 1 big external HDD. Lacie 4Big Quadra will fit your requirement, although it is not cheap.
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DariusJun 12 '13 at 19:30

Well, I know how to google and find items that match the features I am looking for. I was hoping to find someone who has used a particular solution and would give a strong recommendation and share any gotchas the experienced. If there is a better sub-site in the stack exchange for this type of question, I am happy to move the question or re-post.
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DavidJun 13 '13 at 19:36